Tidings from the coast & some island recordings

Dear Reader,

This week, we’re visiting my parents in coastal Massachusetts. We set a goal when we got here to go to a different beach every day, which has resulted in a sense of overwhelming good fortune for having grown up here which, as a kid, I thought was totally normal. The first night we brought chairs to the local beach on Plum Island. I’ve been away from the ocean for months, so could not resist making some simple ocean recordings in a not-negligible amount of desperation to soak up as much as I can while I’m here.

The next day we went back to the island, this time to the more tranquil side where you can hop in a kayak and paddle into the mouth of the Merrimack and over to town (if you aren’t me, because I hate kayaking). It’s been more than twenty years since I’ve had a Mass driver’s license, so I haggled with the parking lot attendant for the reduced resident fee on account of being a grad from the local high school. We made our way to the beach, where a couple with thick Boston accents were hauling a piece of someone’s torn-off rubber dock out of the water. They had two dogs and one looked like a pig. A group of kids were out, on what I assume was a summer camp outing. They were muddy and carrying buckets, a classic combo for field trips around here. With recorder in hand I gravitated over to a rubber dinghie, because I’m in unconditional love with the sound of gentle tide lapping against sturdy rubber.

I put on my headphones, checked the levels and hit record. I know that I smiled when I heard the glorious easy tide amplified by the mic, but your guess would be as good as mine as to what my face did with the remaining four minutes. All I know is that once I started to listen, all sorts of things happened. I’ve been working on notes for this weekend’s meeting on Temperance, which Anonymous beautifully describes as the ability to “think with the flood,” which means that a person simultaneously experiences themselves as individual and inextricably relational, thinking not in a vacuum but with the “anonymous choir of thinkers above, below, yesterday and tomorrow.” I pressed record and then in came the wind. There a rhythm emerged: the wind got big and then so did the waves, the wind then the waves, wind and waves. A small plane passed over. A seagull called in the way that gulls do, as if to spill out of their bodies. In the recording, you can hear a bell at the end, which had been tolling behind us all along though I hadn’t heard it. When I was done with the dinghie recording, we made our way up to the bell.

Here are the two recordings, if you’re curious! I recommend listening with headphones, if you can:

Sea breeze on the basin:

Sea breeze on the bell:

The bell was hung next to a cluster of nesting gourds for purple martins further inland. As we listened I was feeling emotional about the way the wind created rhythms like a call and response with the things it moved through: gust then toll, gust then toll, gust then toll. As we stood there listening, a bird caught a dragonfly for a meal. When she tried to smuggle the insect into her nest, the fly was feistier than we think she hoped they would be and some drama unfurled. In the recording, there is a small storm of flapping to mark this event, the beating wings almost indistinguishable from the two flags flapping a few yards over. Becoming a witness to extraordinary activities is an ordinary occurrence when you slow down to listen like that. And as we trudged back to the car, the bell remained with us. Having been barely perceptible before, it was now impossible to forget.

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